As posted earlier this month, WITNESS archivist Grace Lile is honoring Archives Month by dedicating October’s blog posts to the WITNESS Media Archive to human rights archiving. Today’s entry was submitted by Valerie Love (the Curator for Human Rights and Alternative Press Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut) and calls attention to the fact that there is as yet no established organization for collaboration between human rights archivists and human rights field workers focusing on issues of documentation–an issue that CRL also seeks to address through the Human Rights Electronic Evidence Study. As a step toward addressing this lack, Valerie and T-Kay Sangwand (the Human Rights Archivist for the University of Texas Libraries-Austin) have drafted a petition for establishing a Human Rights Roundtable within the Society of American Archivists. As Valerie notes:

…despite the proliferation of conferences and online information sites regarding human rights archives, there is not yet a space or group [dedicated to human rights] within the largest archival organization in the United States. T-Kay Sangwand of the University of Texas and I are currently petitioning to create a human rights roundtable within the Society of American Archivists (SAA). Informal gatherings of archivists concerned with human rights issues occurred at the SAA meeting in San Francisco in 2008 and at Austin in 2009, but the creation of a official roundtable would formalize current efforts to collaborate and share information on archives and human rights in the United States.